How Does A Pedometer Help People Reach Their Fitness Goals?

Are you one of those fitness-conscious people, who likes to keep track of every step that contributed to their fitness? Then you must’ve heard about the Pedometer, which is used for counting walking steps. The pedometer was a common fitness tool before smartwatches and fitness trackers took over the industry. Still, there is a majority who like to use a dedicated device to count their steps. People claim that Pedometers help them in staying fit. How come? How can a pedometer help people reach their fitness goals? Let’s see how the pedometer does it.

What is a pedometer?

A pedometer is a traditional device, used by people to count the number of steps taken in a day or a specific period of time. With the passage of time, other features have also been included in the pedometers like heart rate measurement, the number of standing hours, and calorie burn.

How does it work?

Pedometers with time have evolved and improved. Before the most commonly used pedometers were mechanical pedometers in which a pendulum or a spring was used to move up and down with each step taken. Each up and down was calculated as one step. Nowadays, more fancy pedometers are on the market, the electronic ones. This kind of pedometer has a cantilever mechanism, in which every time a person moves, it oscillates and this oscillation transmits an electrical pulse. All these pulses are then recorded and counted in the steps.

Benefits of a pedometer

Let’s have a look at the kind of benefits a pedometer possesses.

• It helps in setting fitness goals
• It helps in personal accountability of fitness routine
• They act as your fitness routine buddies
• It also helps in weight loss
• It can help in recording the daily calorie burn as well

How does it help people to reach their goals?

Now when you know about the benefits a pedometer offers, are you wondering how it can help you to reach your goals? Well, here are some logical explanations by which a pedometer can help people reach their goals.

1. By measuring people’s daily physical activity

When you know your steps are being counted whenever you move, you get a clear idea of your goals. As it’s human nature, clear and specific goals drive their motivation. They like to keep a check on what and how much has been done and what’s left to do to get to the final point. Pedometer provides such feedback on a daily basis, by monitoring your steps and calorie burns. It also detects the pace of the steps and keeps notifying about it. This continuous evaluation is the core point that drives their urge to do more and more.

2. By helping people plan their exercises

Accountability is something that makes us do well in every aspect of life. So, this is the case in a fitness routine. If you know how much and for how long you’ve been walking or doing workouts, it’ll help you keep a check on your goals while giving you a clear picture of what to do next. Eventually, people plan out their exercises more efficiently to reach their goals.

3. By motivating people to practice more

The continuous visualization and quantification of the walking progress, motivate people to do more and add consistency to their routine. We, humans, love numbers, because numbers guarantee success or failure in most cases. So, when you see the number going up on a pedometer, you feel good about yourself and want to do more and more. Even if you get lazy after some time and think of not doing it, increasing your count and numbers usually motivates people to get up and challenge themselves. Another interesting feature of the pedometer allows people to compare their current day’s step counts and distance with the step count and distance of the previous day. The comparison between the data of both days motivates people to improve their performance day by day.

Conclusion

A pedometer can be a good option if you want to keep a track of your steps and want to keep an eye on your basic fitness goals. The constant check of physical activity on the pedometer will keep you motivated to do more until you reach your goals. But, a pedometer alone cannot do that. You have to be sincere with yourself about your goals and motivation-only then the pedometer will do its job.